Devs Talk Inspiration and the Love of City-Builders in New Peek at Upcoming Title

Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order today released the first of three developer videos for Cities: Skylines, the upcoming city simulation game for PC, Mac, and Linux. *In the video, Paradox Interactive's Jakob Munthe and Colossal Orders Mariina Hallikainen and Karoliina Korppoo share their visions for the game and love for old school city builders, as well as their charming obsession with traffic.
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Hello again! This time we will take a peek at how the game systems actually work. Some of the main goals for us at Colossal Order where to create fun systems which interact with each other, and to have simulated individual citizens.

At the heart of Cities: Skylines is how the individual citizens and goods move around the city. Citizens have a name, age, a home and a workplace, unless they are students at the university or too young to work. Citizens travel to work, go shopping and occasionally visit leisure locations like parks. Not all citizens own cars, so some walk and others drive. If public transportation is available, most of the people without cars will use it for longer trips. Even people with cars use public transportation if they notice driving with their own car might be slower because of the traffic.

Each city needs to be connected to the outside world. The main reason for this is to allow industry to work with full efficiency, but also tourists use outside connections to travel to the city. There are many possibilities on how to get the best of your connections, so read on to find out more about importing and exporting goods, boosting your city attractiveness with monuments and luring in tourists to spend their hard-earned money in your commercial districts.
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Working on public transport in Cities: Skylines we wanted to offer a variety of choices for the players to set up their public transport network while still keeping in mind that Cities: Skylines is first and foremost a city builder game rather than a transport simulator. Our goal was to implement the feature in so that it would be easy to use, following in suit with the rest of the features while still being robust enough to make it interesting and strategically sound. The fans of Cities in Motion games had always wanted to build rail networks and airports to control the intercity traffic but the scope of those games was always within the city limits. However, with Cities: Skylines' goods transport and citizens moving in and out of the city, we felt that it was a good time to bring in the intercity traffic possibilities to public transport.
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Hi dudes and dudettes! We are back with yet another development diary and this time we'll take a closer look at the various natural resources that are at your disposal when you are building the city of your dreams.

Natural resource types
When we started to design how the maps would look like in Cities: Skylines and what they should have in them we came to the conclusion that rather than being just a stage where the player builds their city, the maps should have a more meaningful role. With the highways and railways crisscrossing the map and the water areas providing challenges for expanding cities, the natural resources work as a reward for expanding strategically throughout the map.
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Hi there, you city builder aficionados! Once again it is the time for another exciting story from the pages of developer diaries. I am your humble host, Henkka, and I am here to talk about zoning. So, gather around by the fire and let your imagination fly...

Oh, and in case you missed the previous entry to the dev diaries, here it is: Dev Diary 1: Roads.

Basics of zoning (or "Why zoning instead of manually placing all buildings?")
If the roads are the bones of the city, then the zones are the meat around the bones. Very early on in the development process it was clear that we wanted the game to feature a zoning tool instead of placing the myriad of the regular buildings manually. With zoning the player's job is to rule where the different types of buildings appear but it is the citizens' (that is the game's) job to actually move in and build the new houses, shops and factories, all according to the different needs of the city. The player can determine what the city requires and when by using the RCI indicator in the GUI.
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Hi guys and gals! Welcome to the exciting world of Cities: Skylines development diaries! My name is Henkka and you might remember me from such dev diaries as Making the levels and The Map Editor for Cities in Motion 2 and Tower Bridge for Cities in Motion. While you are taking a break from enjoying the screenshots and discussions about Cities: Skylines, you can take a look at the development processes behind the awesome game developed by us, Colossal Order and published by our friends at Paradox Interactive.
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